Core Values of the Amazon Conservation Team

ACT maintains a set of “core values” that guide the initiation and development of all programs and projects.

1. ACT believes that conservation is a moral and spiritual issue.  We are dedicated to conservation not only because of its practical applications and implications, but because we believe that everyone bears responsibility for, and benefits because of, the well being of the natural world.
2. ACT believes that its three overarching goals—to preserve the ecosystems of the Amazon, to strengthen the traditional cultures of the resident peoples of the Amazon, and to promote the health of those societies—are interdependent.  We assign equal importance to each goal because we understand them as aspects of an integrated whole.
3. ACT honors and values the cultures of the communities that we are privileged to call our partners.
4. ACT believes that the knowledge and practices of indigenous and other forest communities are important and useful for natural resource conservation and enriching to western healthcare systems.  Moreover, we believe that combining traditional knowledge with modern science and technologies creates optimal long-term environmental solutions.
5. ACT respects the role of traditional healer within Amazonian indigenous communities as paramount, and deeply esteems the knowledge systems that have been handed down to successive generations of healers over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.  
6. ACT believes that long-term progress in rainforest conservation demands real partnerships based on mutual trust with local communities and organizations.
7. ACT supports and promotes the fundamental rights of indigenous people as articulated in Convention #169 of the International Labor Organization (1989) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).  
8. ACT is mindful of its ethical commitment and therefore does not engage in bioprospecting.  However, ACT supports the development of equitable and fair mechanisms in the quest for new rainforest products that guarantee benefit to the general well-being of local communities.  Participation in such contracts is a decision to be made exclusively by the communities involved.